


Salthusband

by Rational_Drunk



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: A harem of salthusbands, Adventure, Exploration of religious and magical systems in the ASOIAF universe, Exploration of unexplored areas of the ASOIAF universe, M/M, Magic, Priapi welcome, Rape, Some degree of purple prose, some degree of facile humour
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-08 23:21:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5516966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rational_Drunk/pseuds/Rational_Drunk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Davos Seaworth, man of the sea, had never left dragon-infested shores only to plunge into the wooden spikes of an ungrateful stag? What if, Davos Seaworth, instead of falling into the loyalty of an unsmiling positivist, and being plagued by his eternal passive-aggressiveness - followed instead another destiny, and became Ironborn? And thus we follow the tale of Davos Seaworth Thrice-drowned, and his ambitious quest to find the Oldtowner renowned to be the most desirable man in pale Westeros, and to take him for his personal salthusband.</p><p>In comes Crixus (OMC), as of the first chapter married to the upstanding Lord of Greenshield, and unwilling dramatis persona of this unfortunate tale.</p><p>(The story begins with the events of the Taking of The Shields, with of course a few major world alterations, and as such spoilers pertaining to the Taking of The Shields are inevitable. Beyond that, however, there should be nothing egregious.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Oyster Home

**Salthusband**

**Chapter 1: Oyster Home**

 

_Davos_

* * *

_Davos_

“Are you sure?”

“Aye. There ain’t no mistakin’ those folks, fancy Reach use beacons to send their messages. Fer example. We ‘aven’t no beacon, so come kill us, we won’t see ye comin’.” Wormtooth supplied a dark grin, exposing the eponymous vein where an incisor used to stalactite.

Davos Seaworth nodded curtly at the lookout, who was by now stowing away a brass telescope into the folds of his breeches, almost gemlike in their motley, foul-smelling shades. Amber for piss, and umber for worse. Davos held a dark suspicion that it was for more reason than pure range of view that Wormtooth was relegated to the crow’s nest at every possible occasion.

This was unfortunately not one of those occasions. There was no crow’s nest on an Ironborn longship, and their lookout was otherwise grounded; or as grounded as you can be at sea. The disparity had by relation made Davos feel somewhat elevated as he sidestepped the revolting man and treaded through the rows of planks and impatient Ironborn to the front of the ship. There he – checking over his shoulder with wide, gray eyes to see that  _yes, the watchtower had vanished behind the cliffs_  – fumbled with an oil lamp and held its contained crystal flame to the darkness of the cove, his orange-tinted face a waxy glimmer of beard and hair and the tip of his carved nose covered in a sheen of dusty grime. The kraken at his boots, curled slumbering and wooden around the ship’s prow, was a flickering monster of shadow lurking amongst purplish tapering walls, penetrating its grooved depths with every violent splash of an oar.

“Looks like a cunt,” remarked a skullcapped man, his eyes chinesed as he studied the mauve architecture of the cove.

There was a murmur of snickering as this truth was being assessed. “Still too tight for me,” came a harsh whisper from the back. More crude laughter.

“Keep rowing, the sooner our feet are on the ground, the better,” said Davos, little mirth rolling in his Fleabottom lilt. Normally, he would have participated in such carnal conversation. Oh yes, Davos Seaworth Thrice-Drowned with a lecherous leer, a concupiscent lustful lascivious rictus  _ah_  would have shared in that eternal camaraderie of ribald preamble to a good  _rape_ , and refused to conceal by any means his tumescence, which would have been tenting his breeches to cast shadow upon his would-be whore –  _no, no,_  not even a flicker of a touch else any tactility would have diminished that final explosion, that final crescendo of a nightlong’s symphony of screams and horrors and deaths and moans as he achieved in his victim a full and eye-blinding  _climax_.

But Davos was uneasy.

They had left their schooners adrift some twenty miles seaward (in irons, unanchored, fear of patrols and pirates), below the horizon and away from the bleary prying eyes of half-drunk Reachfolk atop their slumbering stone towers.  They had ten minutes to slice through twenty miles of sea  _not_ , with any sails to run with the wind, but by rowing oars like so many seafaring millipedes, with the setting sun urging impatiently upon the napes of their necks, its glare their prismatic aegis of disguise. Had they tarried one more second, had they missed even one strike of an oar – then they would’ve been left stranded in the lilac darkness abandoned by the twilight tail of the parting sun. And then the lone light in the distance would have flared into wakeful watchfulness, shattering their nacreous bubble and in its dying vibrancy revealed the dull, gray dusk of six Ironborn longships floundering in the black waves, a rain of fire-tipped arrows their penetrant greeting guide.

And yet, they had done it. They had traversed twenty miles in the time from the sun’s first kiss to its final absorption, their contorted bodies gyrating sails and their perspiration the storm which filled them to portly full mast. With all his years as a man of the sea (and those as a man of the lucrative caverns adorning the sea) he would have laughed, guffawed in any fool’s face at the very suggestion that he with a four-and-twenty longship could breach even half the speed they’d just committed. Inconceivable, unimaginable,  _unnatural_.

He did not laugh when Euron Greyjoy suggested that that was exactly what he should do.

There was a slight lurch as the boat turned a dark (then light, an aching lanterned arm) corner and drifted into a large basalt cavern, its spiderwood prow issuing a category of waves which mated with those returning from the opposing shore in a criss-crossed farrago, the water of Oyster Home under his dancing fire a shimmering mirror-window of harlequin gold and translucent warp. It looked just as he remembered it, in the darkness of two decades ago when the Targaryen was still king and the rebellion was still young, and there was still pearl to be made in Oyster Home. War the moral laxative of principled men.

“Ho.” His second was awaiting his signal. An expectant pause. He the motionless ferryman at the prow, where in the haloed flame of his psychopompic arm illuminated the faces of a-hundred-and-fifty Ironborn men, back a blackness as dark as their sins, and front a succession of grinning, flame-faced demons, bobbing faintly at the gates of a future hell.

He nodded, and on cue the boat slowed to a halt before the shore, followed by her attending sisters of darkness in a series of rhythmic strokes. Six consecutive  _thuds_ into the sienna dunes. Watching his step (he was no longer young), he strode across the lurching strait between boat and shore, his face eclipsed as he, balanced precariously between worlds, spared a hesitant glance to check for whatever sorcery may be lurking in the waters. Perhaps a concert of colourless, bloated arms, waving and writhing from the glaucous depths and slithering against the underside of his ship like a cadaverous anemone; or a submerged village, its inhabitants swaying softly with every lullaby of dark current, upside-down at the bottom of Oyster Home with their heads buried in the inky ooze; or the face of a pallid mermaid, crying tears of blood in wisps of crimson, watery haze, the garbled bubbles escaping her gray lips repeating over and over again, as they rushed breathlessly to the surface, the words:  _Euron Greyjoy Euron Greyjoy Euron Greyjoy…_

But thirty feet under the crystal surface of Oyster Home there was only sand, a few smaller oyster homes, and veins of pale, quivering light.

“Tunnel right here, leads to a cellar under an inn. The Staggering Magpie, good ale, warm fire, fuckable innkeeper.” He raised the lantern to the accused aperture, the swinging light streaking across the chamber in a rapid dawn and casting him in a crescent succession of wanes and waxes, apogees and perigees, darkness and a lecherous leer. What did it matter, if Euron Greyjoy had indeed participated sorcery, and Damphair was right and the foreign priest and his God of Flame had extended their phantom limbs to stir at their oars through watery twilight? The Drowned God had nothing to say on the matter of sorcery, save for the fact that he himself practiced none… and Euron had promised him the Oldtown boy. No harm done, the crimson priest was far away on another Shield, and he was on his close to his prize, his pearl, his palpitating groom. “Used to trade with a carpenter here, during the rebellion.” He grunted as he scaled a dark ledge, stuccoed by lime, sand and ocean air. Added to the scraping noise of the devils behind, boots crushing into black rocks and spraying inkish water. “Heartwood, they use it for shields and siege equipment, Robert’s army needed very much of them, in Storm’s End. I sold them to the Targaryens for dragon coins.”

“You’re the reason that Stannis died?” came the bodiless voice he recognised to be Braeon’s, the nasal intonations floating off dark walls masking a vicious man. The thought that the late king’s late brother’s death may have been partly his concoction seemed to fill the gangling Ironborn with considerable amusement, the same sense of humour when two weeks ago he with a strong index and thumb crushed a man’s nostrils together, the doomed knight’s face purpling in violet violation as Davos emptied his cock down his throat.

“No,” he said, the O expanding downward in his Fleabottom cadence. His wife used to find that endearing, not just his negations but his general accent. Made him sound amicable, she said, a Fleabottom boy non-threatening and passive. How much has changed. “Heard by the time the Targaryens broke through the place was more tomb than fortress. They found the man a scarecrow, a ghost saying that he had eaten his wife.”

He was there during the siege, his ship returning from dragon-bannered shores with a chestful of pregnant gold on matronly way to Southport; when for a moment of madness, he had thought that good, now that the dragon was sated, perhaps it was opportune to take advantage of this lumber-induced slumber and ferry some of his rations to starving stags on the dull gray rock in the distance. He knew the right cave, and the right wind and tide; and surely the Baratheon would be more than willing to reward him with the right  _price_  when the war was concluded and the conclusion in their favour... 

And then the moment passed, like the descent of a distant and terrible sun, and telling his men to tack to the westerly wind, Storm’s End sank beneath the horizon along with it. A month later, at night of a happy feast, came news of the dragons’ storm, and in the same letter Stannis Baratheon’s excruciating End. He remembers the slight pique in his interest at this information, his right hand clasped around a tankard of ale (tax-free) and his left absent-mindedly picking at his then dark beard with pensive fingers, wondering what might have passed had he been an uncharacteristically kinder man.

“Think he ate her cunt?” Braeon’s cackle echoed sharply through the darkness.

“From the rumours, probably would’ve been the first time,” replied Davos. Ribald preamble, tumescent priap, throb the hollow drum of wood above his head and the candlelit murmur of voices in the distance.  _Ah_ , he smiled, his lone grey eye glimmering in the stripe of light which had fallen through the planks and onto the darkness of his passion.  _I have come to fetch my groom._  

 

* * *

_To be continued._

Author's notes:

Merry Christmas! Feel free to leave a comment, especially if you'd like a continuation; which is always lovely to read!


	2. Obiter Dicta

**Salthusband**

**Chapter 2: Obiter Dicta**

_Crixus_

* * *

_Crixus_

“Not at first glance.”

“So there _are_ diversions to be sought upon your fair isle?”

“Yes.”

Crixus’s gaze remained steady upon _The Euhemerisation of Brandon the Builder_. It was difficult to concentrate under all the noise in the Chestershield ballroom, where every slam of tankard upon wood rippled through the orange scrying pool of punch (violent name for a drink), and jostled in its citrus sheen the reflection of the man of the hawk nose, and gorilla jaws who probably thought the curtness of his affirmation stemmed from shyness.

“I remain here for many weeks, until the end of the harvest. Mayhap you will show me around them in my duration?”

Negation would have been uncultured. As was courting a married man. Such was the trouble with these courtly charades, it was difficult to find the right answer to two questions masqueraded so innocently as one. In silence Crixus reached for a ladle, stirring into its silver tub a pool of violence and lifting it from the rest of the sea in a sugary waterfall, a sliced tangerine drifting into the citrine man’s grinning left eye as he poured the mawkish concoction into his cup.

He took a sip, hoping the autumn potion would provide him with the necessary ingredients to respond to the raven-haired lord’s proposal, such as wisdom, strength, courage, wit, a jealous husband at his side.

“No.”

Or truth.

“So this is the level of hospitality one has to expect from House Chester. You, sir, are an arrogant ignoramus.” And at that bewildering reply the mainland lord left in an offended huff, vanishing into the evening darkness of the ballroom, where a song and dance were just beginning to spiral into bloom.

Crixus pretended to read, even as he pursed his lips, licking from them orange juices in the darkness of his mouth. He frowned. To those around him, was he still presenting a delectable image? Him, head bowed, in fantastic submission, lips pursed coyly implying molding possibility, would that attract more moths into dispassionate flame? What other dark thoughts and doubts and silent battles did he conjure, for example, behind those hard, brown eyes across the table, crinkled in laughter and glancing fleetingly in his direction? Would they tempt their owner, a hoary cousin of Serry to throw down his long mahogany shield, and grab instead onto strands of short oaken hair and plunge ivory passion through pursed lips, into wet silk nectarous and cool? Would his bright-eyed brother, clearing the table of its roast beefs and untouched salads in a violent tornado, join in?

Ah, he did not care. Let the men and their lords have their fantasies. Their dimness of thought was no business of his, and come more tumescent suitors with rosed barbs he would simply deny them all, civility be damned. And if Geoff complained to him of the angry letters and strained diplomacies then perhaps he should not have humiliated him by leaving him to the wolves in the fucking first place.

“Hard to please, these mainland nobles,” said the man who assumed an attempt at pleasure was being involved. The stranger creaked a hostaged chair from the buzzing crowd and landed it sans permission next to the young lord consort. His weathered jerkin, tied with goatskin straps, slid up to reveal a fulsome groin as he settled into his newborn seat in a rustle of coarse linens and metallic weight. Chainmail. He stared at Crixus with piercing grey eyes.

The Oldtowner decided to bite.

“And yet, you do not sound to be from the Shields.” Nor from anywhere else, despite various diplomatic acquaintances. The throaty low hum, the rhotic lilts, and the drawing out of curt vowels into sighing _aahhhs_ was not a combination which he recognized, though with vague recollection he seemed to detect a murmur of the east, a trickle of the Blackwater Rush running behind lyrical intonations like a tributary eddying around riverbed dolostones. The mnemonic waters sparkled, yes, but the only family upon its smiling shores was an obsequious House Raist, and congeneric the thrum may be the gurgle was distinct. Perhaps…

“Aye, I’m not from these parts. But I’m not a fancy noble either, which I’m sure you can tell. You’re clearly one, very good-looking. One of the most good-looking I’ve ever seen, in fact.” His friendly aged eyes met those narrowed in suspicion. “Oh, you mustn’t think I’m intruding on your feast, young lord. I’m a knight, you see, oh you don’t see, I don’t clean up too well I’m afraid, but I have a message for the Lord Chester, from King’s Landing. No, not alone, there’s my captain, yes that’s him over there, he cleaned up much better than me, very shiny. In the meanwhile, your guards have been very kind to allow us to wait here, and to partake in your sweet refreshments.” He poured himself a cup of punch with long, thick fingers, and brought its silver brim to his lips. He refreshed. He refreshed again. Wiping away the sweetness glistening upon the short hairs of his greying beard he grinned, in quenched satisfaction. “Very tasty. So, are you related to Lord Chester? I overheard you talking.”

Eavesdropped. But apart from that, the man seemed sincere enough. With an inward sigh, Crixus folded _The Euhemerisation of Brandon the Builder_ and, checking for errant sauces or the cup-shaped faerie ring of ice-cold dew, put it to rest upon the table which had just begun to shake. A drunken man had clambered to the top on the other end and broken into song, breaking the song. Crixus exhaled shortly in amusement. Transferring his awkward smile from the sudden spectacle to the haggardly knight, he said, “I’m the Lord Consort.”

“Oh, I see. Of course.” The man spoke gruffly, haltingly, as though wrestling with dark doubts. For a flicker of candlelight he hesitated before he continued. “I hope you don’t think me too forthright for saying this, my lord, but to be honest, it wasn’t just that one noble I overheard. It were three, who came before him to bother you, and I know why they all did. And I’m sure you know why I knew, because I’ve been staring at you this whole time. You, are the most good-lookin' man I have ever seen.” Crixus chuckled in polite embarrassment, to an impassive knight. There was no mirth in those watery grey eyes which appraised him in open seriousness, and Crixus realized with a strange jolt that it was meant to be a statement, as one would state the weather, or the eternity of the sun. The lack of emotion was almost eerie to the ear. “It makes me wonder how Chester could bear to leave you alone, here, anywhere, with all these hounds about. If you would be so kind to allow it, I would gladly to be your guardian while he is gone.”

Crixus stared at the man in bemusement, and after a pair of heartbeats released his held breath in a low chuckle. The sound, mute to the rest of the turbulent, twilight ballroom, attracted the nearby attention of a pair of attractive brothers sat in the shadow of a boar’s head (summer in Rosewood, dinner in Highgarden) next to a dying torch. The low flame flickered hungrily in the dark pools of their eyes.

“Why not?”

“Ah, thank you, my lord! Should anyone else give you bother now, then they will have to answer to my sword.” A partially gloved hand palmed at the question’s hilt. “I am lucky, ha, my men will weep tears of sorrow and rage, and my captain will have my hide, when they learn that Crixus Hightower had been, for a night, my liegelord!” The knight’s carved face (he was quite attractive) shimmered under the candlelight in a waxy eclipse as he lowered himself onto one knee, displaying the top of his wan, greying crown to his lord as he waited in bearded expectation.

Crixus smiled wearily. He never had a knight of his own before, and was faced with the same apprehension which had once grasped at an Oldtown boy, stood in terrified excitement before a small wooden box, where sawdust leaked from punched holes and stenciled letters spelled out the word _puppy_. He was unsure of how to proceed. Was he supposed to give a speech, then reaching for his plate tap the man on rough shoulders with a butter knife? He had never even held a sword before, having trained to be a maester, would it be more appropriate then, perhaps, to tap him with a book instead? He nearly chuckled as he imagined crowning the gruff knight with an open copy of _The Euhemerisation of Brandon the Builder_ , serious grey eyes staring up at him through bookish steeple, and in the background the drunkard continued to sing in horrible Valyrian.

“I, Crixus Chester, accept you as my protector, and with its rank your sword and your vows.” His speech was a specious memory of his husband’s knighting ceremonies, and he attempted to inject into it as much lightness and jocosity as possible, lest it sound binding.

“I am honoured to serve.” There was no irony in that gruff, lilting voice.

This was probably not how his father pictured him bestowing his first knighthood. Crixus wondered if he would be proud of him or mortified – most likely both. And rueful. Hightower gave credit where credit was due, after all, and by that account his marriage to Geoff was a gross miscalculation on his part, leading to deficit. Perhaps his father should have paid more attention to the gaudy songs played around Oldtown hearths, one of which to Crixus’s ear-rending horror was being sung in his father’s favourite tavern.

Because then the Lord Hightower, breaking from expressions of disappointment repeating in his ancient study, would have looked up from manifold documents to stare at his young liability, and reassessed him with a calculating eye. Then, eventually, with some shuffling of ledgers and some eternal patience, for one must water a flower before its plucking, just as one must wait for a weed to sprout before pulling at its roots – Crixus would have been whored off to some pale-faced Lannister in exchange for bottomless mines, or some perennial Tyrell farmland where he would’ve been sent to graze like a bartered cow. Thankfully, his father’s eternal perspicacity wavered in its measured alembic, and milked him in greedy thrusts far too quickly and far too soon, and now for Chester and not Hightower he laid his golden eggs.

At that pleasant analogy, he adjusted himself in his chair, sliding the seat of his leather-strapped trousers against polished mahogany as he straightened his back to address the kneeling knight. In a gesture of polite embarrassment he scratched at his forehead, when a rough hand grabbed at his and pulled it into the scratchy embrace of thin, colourless lips.

Crixus recoiled instantly, clutching in his left palm the back of his hand which tingled under the memory of coarse grey hairs, and a patch of quickly evaporating wetness.

“My lord is offended?” Grey eyes hurriedly staring up into his were concerned, though behind apologetic tones and the drunkard in the background Crixus thought he detected, perhaps purely in the darkness of his hysterical imagination, a flicker of amusement.

“You are fortunate my husband is not around,” Crixus said, wiping the back of his fist on his thigh. “He does not take kindly to molesters.”

“I thought it was local custom to kiss the hand of one’s lord.” The man’s face was bowed in chagrin.

“I am no lord,” the lord consort said wearily. The eastern knight looked so stricken and anguished under the candlelight that Crixus could feel himself relenting. “And I am not local. But that is irrelevant. Neither In Oldtown nor the Reach do you do what you just did sans permission.”

“My apologies, my lord. I wasn’t aware.”

“Then be aware. I find consent appropriate in most matters.”

“I will try to keep that in mind,” said the man, shoulders hunched in placation and smiling awkwardly from the ground. It was quite endearing, this presumption of baseborn men, and he supposed he could not truly blame him. Crixus realized-

The hand which had landed upon his shoulder was familiar, so familiar in fact that he did not immediately recognise to whom it belonged, but rather with a subconscious jolt registered it as part of his anatomy, as the whisper upon his thighs, the broad palm across erect nipples, the lengths inching into his depths, and the rough hotness around his passion. It was also firm and businesslike, however, and all coital thoughts slithered away into the darkness as he stared into his husband’s stormy face.

“If you would provide us with a moment, I have need to speak with my husband,” he said to Crixus’s protector, whose pale fingers had been caressing at the pommel of his sword. The knight’s eyes widened with grey surprise as he shuffled to his feet.

“Lord Chester. I have a message for you.” He scrabbled around the folds of his jerkin, and pulled out with deft fingers a stringed scroll, its edges flared in the impression of the wind.

“That will have to wait,” Geoff said.

Curt. And the arm around his waist was crushingly tight as Geoff spun him away from the table and directed him toward the center of the ballroom, where the majority of the guests, amidst violin songs and ribald encouragements, were participating in some variety of summer dance. Before they were absorbed into the shifting understory of twirling dresses and spinning frocks, however, Crixus realized that he still did not know his strange knight’s name. He turned around and called out to his protector, who answered, in his Fleabottom voice which floated above the clamour of the crowd:

“Davos. Davos Seaworth. A humble and honest man.”

 

* * *

 

“You’re hurting me.”

“Perhaps you deserve it. What were you doing with that man?”

“I am aware of how it looked, with him in that position. But you need not worry. I can assure you that he was fellating me.”

Under the loud, rhapsodic melody swirling through energetic crowds, no one noticed the squeal of discomfort, when a hoary arm slithered through the darkness and constricted around Crixus’s waist like a pale anaconda.

“Ow!”

“Tell me. Now.”

“He was a knight, if you must know. He had been keeping suitors at bay to protect me, even though he probably should be protecting me from you, you big brute.”

Geoff ignored that. “And how do you know that the sheepdog wasn’t simply another a wolf in disguise?”

“You know I enjoy it when you compare me to a lamb chop.”

They had reached the center of the ballroom, under a towering chandelier which pierced through the cavernous darkness like a dim stalactite. With the burly arm around his husband Geoff spun him into the shadow of his embrace like a human top, and in silent surrender Crixus melted into that embrace, and evaporated into his lord’s air, him shadow upon shadow swaying to the violins in the background and the strong heart beating against his chest.

“I’m sorry for leaving you alone.” Geoff said softly into his ear. Tenderness. There was no need, after all, for discretion. The violin tendons strumming in the background cloaked them in a bubble of shared solitude, as they paced to the deafness of the surrounding crowd.

“I’m sure it was important,” was his muffled reply. At least they got their dance. “Shit song though,” he added in afterthought.

“I like it.”

“You like every song, Geoff.”

They stayed that way for a while, in welded embrace, dancing to music and pacing to oblivion. In the vague haze of his consciousness, Crixus came to appreciate the incredible dimness of it all. For certainty, he would have found it very much to his satisfaction to be at the center of courtly attention, despite earlier reticences. Would that above him the quartz chandelier flared into honeycomb life, fiery moon to the torchlight stars lit so suddenly as though by the breath of a ghost, and the illuminated crowd: lords and ladies, noblemen and noblewomen, knights and his own, all stopped in their inadequate capering to stare blearily at the sudden sun, under which he and the Lord Chester of this keep waltzed effortlessly to a chorus of sighs and looks of envious, painful admiration. _Most beautiful man in the world, look at them whom I wish we were, would that I had him for my own, he is wealth and Chester is a bandit_ ; Crixus’s heart would leap as he listened to their thoughts, his passive face not betraying the titillation of his ego as he and his lord paced helically under vaulted ceilings, and their boots scuffled confidently across kaleidoscope floors.  

But this was good, too. He nuzzled into the warmth of his husband’s neck, inhaling deeply his scent, and Geoff responded by tightening his arms around him. This pressed together their chests so tightly that it felt as though his big brute was attempting to pull their hearts into the same chamber, and in fatuous longing Crixus mimicked the action, crushing himself against the broader chest and feeling the other heart beating desperately against his own. It had been a while since they had done anything remotely romantic together, and he hoped, with another reciprocative squeeze from his husband, that this moment would last for centuries.

“Did something bad happen?” He asked into Geoff’s shoulder, his oaken brow furrowed in worry as he stared into the swaying panorama of the ballroom.

The song was tapering to shallower melodies, heralding the end of the charade. Against the rungs of his ribs he felt a gliding hollowness, as Geoff drew a heavy breath.

“There was an attack on one of the inns. The Staggering Magpie.”

Crixus sighed. The Staggering magpie was one of four inns on the island, four miles from the port, near the sea where the curve of shale melted into marshland and spiderwood trees. It was also by far the most accommodating of inns, spaciously speaking, and was no doubt where many attendants of the currently oblivious guests around them were residing.

“Bandits?”

Bandits, like midnight falcons swooping through the dark in a flutter of capes and bile-coloured sacks, sinking their claws into shepherdless prey. He could only hope that some of the culprits remained, limping from some dark knife between a handmaiden’s breasts perhaps, their talons caught in the fleece of wayward sheep. It was always good to have a scapegoat to show for when in lack of the actual species.

“Perhaps.” Geoff said wearily. “None of them were still there when we reached the inn.”

“What of the inhabitants?”

Geoff sighed. Of course.

“All dead.”

“Alright.” Crixus processed this information. In the distance, the clear crescent of the moon had floated into the Stranger’s arms. It gleamed cruelly like an ivory scythe. “Alright. Valuables. Did they remain?”

“Little.” Geoff with an arm around his waist walked him towards the edge of the marbled ballroom, where stacked against the wall sat a roped medley of barrels and crates, wine and bottles of wine. The mound looked for all the world as though a drunken fisherman had mistaken his fare, and had cast his panoptic net over what he thought to be a school of very square and wooden fish. Skirting a couple sat upon the maritime hostages, exchanging insensate nothings, Geoff led him into the tasteless chintz of a cabriole couch. Crixus winced in discomfort as he felt the metallic edge dig into the bottom of his thighs. “But it matters little. The man Rylos, some baker who was returning from a delivery, was the one who informed us. He said the noise started as he left, the noise of at least fifty swords.”

A chill ran down Crixus’s back. It did not matter if Rylos the bunseller was exaggerating, at least thirty men were required for the carnage of The Staggering Magpie. The inn was not utterly defenseless, there were guards, and for as many handmaidens with their handkerchiefs there were mercenaries with their swords. No, the massacre and the number of men was not what disgruntled him. What was actually troubling was the jagged disparity of the painted scenarios, which in eerie disjointment pierced through Crixus’s mind like a window of stained glass, shattered into manifold fragments and realigned into a rainbow phantasmagoria of semantic perversions. On one of the shards was thirty men, whereas on another, floating glaucously to the surface from the inky ooze of his confused mind, was closed tavern doors. The bandits could not have masqueraded themselves in such large numbers, and must’ve come from within. Perhaps they hid in the cellar. Perhaps they used some unknown entrance.

That was the first connection, and it was loose with the inchoate. Rising up with a sepulchral gleam was another pair of shards, garish and already connected, like an overly large puzzle piece teethed into another one far too small, before one realized that they had forgotten the nasal slice, and had joined eyes and chin together to create the portrait of some unnatural imp. On those shards painted clearly a halting, discontinuous message: These men could number more than thirty. Greenshield is a small island. Another fragment said: That number of outlaws for their isolated population is disproportionate. They must have come from somewhere else. Another shard, this was getting shambolic, and his sweat was growing cold: There is no reason for such a large group, to target an island inn. And yet they had stolen valuables, like bandits. Ooze drained from the polychromatic façade of another piece: They came from overseas, so they must have bypassed the sentries. They may number more than thirty. A final portrait was conjured, the smithereens stringing themselves together into a subcutaneous skein, where they centrally blared through the red recesses of his mind like a siren’s piercing wail: They must have planned around the feast. They are not bandits. They are trying to mislead us. They may number more than thirty. They are not bandits, and may number more than thirty.

“It’s an invasion,” Crixus said, his heart rising into his throat.

“What?” Geoff leaned back to observe him in puzzlement, when the chandelier in the ballroom fell to the ground.

It is difficult to explain, in words, the exact impact, the specific overwhelming _push_ , of the first step of a danse macabre. The lightning whistle, the crystal explosion, and the thud which he in uncommon perspicacity discerned to be a crossbow bolt driving itself into an oil canvas forty feet from where he stood; this ritornello of sounds crashed against his ears like the footsteps of a cosmic giant, who held in ambidextrous hands the nebulas of time and fate, and toed the aurora edge of the universe within which contained the laws of coeval consequence, and beyond which eternity loomed. The rest, came to him in a visual flash.

On the floor splayed like a dead bride was the quartz chandelier, the wax from multifarious spilt candles rolling down crystal folds like milky tears, some of them burning with fire. There was screaming. Perhaps there had been all this time. The scintillating crowd retreating from the scene of the crime like matches floating away from a droplet of soap. Then torches being flared. Illuminated a groom beneath the bride’s opalescent frocks, midriff crushed under her imperial weight, and sundry pieces of quartz and glass piercing his body displayed him in passing panorama as a bleeding porcupine. He twitched. More screams. A man tucking away his crossbow. A twisted face in the shadows, swords, clashing. A man pulling out his crossbow. The sounds of someone crying tribute _to the Drowned God_ , and the sounds of someone drowning. Upon the balcony cruel hooks gleamed in silver moonlight. The couple on the boxes got to their feet, and looked for an exit. Hirsute hands grasped on to the hooks. Shadows overwhelmed a guard. He ran when Geoff told him to, he had sworn to obey. Geoff picking up a sword. No one in the doorway. Crossbow bolts whistled like thunder. No one in the corridor.

He ran.

* * *

_To be continued._

Author's notes:

Argh, still no sex. Next chapter, I swear.

Also, feel free to leave a comment, I like comments.


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